Red team against a tier-1 bank
Emulate a targeted intrusion end to end — then harden every path we found.
The challenge
A retail bank wanted to know what a motivated attacker could actually achieve: not a list of theoretical vulnerabilities, but concrete proof of impact against its most sensitive assets (Active Directory, payment systems, customer data).
Classic penetration tests, siloed by scope, didn't answer that question. It needed a realistic red team engagement, with business objectives, stealth and enough time to reproduce a real campaign.
Our approach
We ran a full adversary emulation aligned to MITRE ATT&CK, with objectives agreed with the security committee. From an initial foothold gained via targeted phishing, our operators moved laterally to domain admin while staying under the radar of existing detections.
Every technique was logged and time-stamped. Afterwards, a purple team session replayed the scenario with the client's blue team to turn every undetected step into a validated detection rule.
Engagement flow
- Reconnaissance and external attack-surface mapping
- Initial access via targeted phishing and MFA bypass
- Privilege escalation and lateral movement (Kerberoasting, BloodHound)
- Objective completion, simulated exfiltration, then purple team debrief
The bank went from 2 of 14 techniques detected to near-complete coverage, with a prioritized remediation plan and a retest that confirmed the critical paths were closed.